Video fun: the truth in advertising

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This post has some videos embedded. If you read this in an email update or your RSS feed reader the videos might not show up. In that case you’ll have to click through to eirikso.com to see them.


(Image: Coca Cola advertising in Romania)

I’ve been working several years within the professional consulting business. Going to endless meetings discussing projects, marketing, design, business plans and you name it. Sometimes you sit there wishing you could say your raw and true thoughts, but you can’t. You have the client in there. You have the boss in there. Etc. But in fiction you can. This video has been out there for two years, but I guess some of you haven’t seen it.

The Truth in Advertising. If you have been working as a business consultant or within marketing it’s worth the 12 minutes. This is what happens if people say the truth. You have the whole cast in here. The boss that has no clue and only wants to add some fear. The creatives that only want to win an award. The lousy director that really wants to do something else but needs his house renovated and so on. Have fun.

You find a low quality 3 minute excerpt here as well. And another similar video called The Truth in ad sales is also on the tube.

These videos illustrate the consulting and marketing business like they’ve always been. But there are big changes going on regarding the relationship between the advertiser and the consumer. Fredrik Hallberg pointed me to this video some months ago and I think it illustrates parts of that change very well.

Video fun: the truth in advertising

Never bored – Part 2

eirikso, , , 6 Comments

I wasn’t bored at the Zurich airport, and as you already know I found some entertainment in Frankfurt as well. In addition to the band and the CEO of the whole airport I just had to shoot the tunnel between terminals A and B.

A fantastic place for a 10mm super wide angle. I traveled alone, so to put a person in the image I had to use myself. And when leaving the camera on the floor, walking down the hall to let the timer shoot an image some of the other people in the tunnel started looking pretty suspicious.

But I managed to shoot a couple of nice images without being bothered by security. And apparently I am not the only one finding this spot interesting.

Never bored – Part 2

Some advice for building a web site – 2007

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To some extent I am repeating myself, but I just had to get this down. The web is evolving and rules change. Both for the the people using the web and for the people publishing. First, consider these four words, describing a couple of things that are important (click the words to get the full story behind them):

Content
Make it available and remember the long tail.

Conversation
Communication channel. Not only a distribution channel.

Context
Metadata, tags, RSS, widgets and descriptions.

Control
Give the users control.

Then focus on keeping things simple and spend huge amounts of money on getting the usability right.

Then build your site using as much off-the-shelf software as possible. And remember that there are a lot of free, open source solutions that are very solid systems. A standard LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) or something similar as the basis. Consider publishing systems like WordPress and Drupal. Frameworks like Ruby on rails and Django. For media publishing consider professional solutions like Brightcove, vpod.tv, kyte.tv, Blip.tv etc. And don’t be afraid to integrate with well proven sites like Flickr for images, del.icio.us for tagging, YouTube for video etc.

When you are making that system that lets your audience get some control you might have to build an API for them. Why not start with the API and build the initial system using that yourself?

Yes, I know. This isn’t the definitive guide to build a killer web site, please feel free to add your best advice in the comments.

Some advice for building a web site – 2007

Frankfurt Airport Concert – need some help…

eirikso, , 7 Comments

On my way back from Bucharest I had a connection in Frankfurt and when arriving at the airport something was happening there. Huge crowds and a band playing. I always bring my camera and had about two hours to kill before my flight to Oslo. So I decided to snap some images of the band.

And while standing there shooting the band someone nearly stepped on me. And suddenly I was surrounded by professional photographers and video cameras. Apparently they where following some important guy around. Being so close I took the liberty to snap an image of this person as well.

Maybe I am utterly ignorant, but I must admit that I don’t know who this person is. Or what band was playing. Anyone out there that recognize these people? Should I have known them?

Frankfurt Airport Concert – need some help…

Airbus A380 over Oslo

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Okay. So I didn’t bring my 70-200 f4 L IS, but I managed to get a couple of shots with my 60mm. The plane passed over Oslo in very nice weather. Pretty impressive and a plane of that size seems to fly so unbelievably slow!

They’re here in hope of gaining some ice on the plane while taking off tomorrow morning. Testing. Just testing. We don’t see many regular jumbos here in Oslo and I guessFrom time to time we see the 747 Jumbo Jet here in Oslo but this huge guest won’t frequent our airport in the near future.

Airbus A380 over Oslo

NetCamp – Presentation and images

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First of all I want to say thank you to the organizers, the speakers and the audience. Great people. I learnt a lot during the conference and had a great time in Bucharest. Both of the speakers dinners and all the socializing between sessions where very rewarding. And I learnt that in Romania there are two utterly evil Pigeons that want to end the world. Fantastic.


In the image: Hugh MacLeod

Unfortunately I didn’t have the time to attend all the sessions. When speaking at conferences there’s always some time spent preparing, talking to journalists and answering questions. But I managed to attend some of the sessions close to the one I was speaking in and experienced the entertaining and interesting session from Mr. Hugh MacLeod about social objects and the secret of the Kula.

Miel Van Opstal gave valuable advice regarding social media, marketing, and the very important word FRAM. Friend Spam. You know. All those irritating invites and all that crap. From your own friends.


In the image: Miel Van Opstal

Mr. Rodrigo Schultz shared his experience creating a successful company: don’t talk to venture capitalists. If they really knew what was going on they would have been entrepeneurs. Wouldn’t they? And scale your system. On the internet you can go from utterly unknown to utterly known in a matter of minutes. And remember that you’re global from day one.


In the image: Rodrigo Schultz

Measuring by the response from the audience, comments here on eirikso and the people I have talked to it seems like my presentation was very popular as well. I appreciate that. It’s always difficult to know what will be the right focus depending on the audience. My presentation is now up on slideshare. My style leaves most of the information to what I am saying on stage, but I have included relevant links to give it value even for the people that didn’t attend. I did 85 slides in exactly 36 minutes.

http://static.slideshare.net/swf/ssplayer2.swf?doc=blogging-and-social-media-1197038596832843-5

You find my Flickr set here and the same images on SmugMug here. On SmugMug you can buy the originals for professional use as well. And please let me know if anyone want high resolution copies for non commercial or personal use.

On my way to the airport I was lucky enough to get a quick ride through parts of town. Snapping some images and finally having a glimpse of more than the Howard Johnson and the traffic jam from the airport. Guess I’ll have to come back to Romania during summer some time!

NetCamp – Presentation and images

Netcamp – And another gadget for your presentations

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On tuesday I leave for Bucharest to speak at NetCamp. I like speaking at events like these, so I look forward to that, but I’ll also try to attend as much as possible of the rest of the conference. Including extremely interesting people like Hugh MacLeod of Gapingvoid and Rodrigo Sepulveda Schulz of vpod.tv

Depending on connectivity and available time I’ll try to post some updates during my trip.

And now. The gadget. An addition to the rest of the essential equipment for your presentations. The unbalanced stereo audio output on any laptop always provide you with a bit of noise. Enough to make it really annoying in big theatres with huge sound systems. You don’t want that noise in the speakers when presenting and unless the audio system at the venue filters it out it will be there as long as your laptop is connected.

This noise won’t go away if you turn down the volume or mute the laptop. As long as that unbalanced minijack is connected you’ll have the noise.

Now connect a small and very cheap external volume control. And you can pump up the volume to the max from your laptop and turn it down again on that external volume knob. Unless you need insane amount of volume you’ll be able to supress some of the noise with this method. The one in the image is from my favourite store in Oslo. Clas Ohlson. Geek store numero uno.

Netcamp – And another gadget for your presentations

There’s something wrong with my car

eirikso, , , 4 Comments

I live in Norway. A place where you’re not allowed to drive more than 100 km/h on any of our roads. Still, the speedometer of my car goes all the way to 220 km/h and according to Toyota’s official specs for my Rav4 it has a max speed of 185 km/h. Driving at that speed on Norwegian roads would be both dangerous and utterly illegal. Illegal to the point that they would put me in jail.

I bought the car in Norway. It’s registered and fully official. This isn’t an illegal pirate car. I can roam around Norwegian streets with it. Completely blessed by the police, the king and whatever person that cares. As long as I follow the rules and keep it under 100 km/h.

So why is it possible to drive the car in 185 km/h? Why on earh didn’t the officials put in some kind of Digital Speed Management (DSM)?

It should have looked like this when sold in Norway:

Complete with encryption to stop it from going faster than 100 km/h. That would probably save lives. Preventing people from driving too fast is important. Still we don’t add Digital Speed Management to cars. Not even in the pretty controlled and safe country of Norway.

We don’t do it because that would be too much of a limitation on our freedom. That would be very irritating when taking the car into Germany or another country where you can drive much faster than in Norway. Such limitations don’t fit into our mental models of what you get when you buy a car. People would protest. Loud protests.

Yes, I know. Digital Rights Management on music and movies isn’t exactly like this. But there is something with the comparison that’s not that far fetched. DRM sucks.

(And for all the people that keep asking me how I have the time to write articles on my blog. This was written at Stavanger airport while waiting for my plane to Oslo.)

There’s something wrong with my car

Foodpairing

eirikso, , 1 Comment

Oyvind leads me to this: Foodpairing.

The story:

– FOODPAIRING –
“Food combines with each other when they have major flavour components in common.”

A list was made of 250 food products each with their major flavour components. By comparing the flavour of each food product eg strawberry with the rest of the food and their flavours, new combinations like strawberry with peas can be made. The way to use is, is just to select a food product like strawberries. You will get a plot where you have strawberry in the middle surrounded by other food products. Take one of those other food products and try to make a new recipe by combining those two. The more flavours food products have in common the shorter the distance between the food products.

– FOOD IS INTERCHANGEABLE –
A food product has a specific flavour because of a combination of different flavours. Like basil taste like basil because of the combination of linalool, estragol, …. So if I want to reconstruct the basil flavour without using any basil, you have to search for a combination of other food products where one contains linalool (like coriander), one contains estragol (like tarragon),… So I can reconstruct basil by combining coriander, tarragon, cloves, laurel. The way to use it is to take from each branch of the plot one product and make a combination of those food products.

Wonderful. I need to leave. For the kitchen. Experiments. Lots of experiments.

More food on eirikso:
The pepper matters
How to roast your own coffee
Good American sparkling wine
Make your own mustard with chili and honey

Foodpairing

How to quickly compare two directories

eirikso, , , , 6 Comments

I am in a process of organizing some of the data on my hard drives around the house. And during that boring task I needed to compare the contents of two directories. There are several ways to do that, but I liked a small program called KDiff3 enough to mention it here.

It’s free and multi platform. Download for your operating system here.

It can compare files or directories and help you merge the results if you want to.

“$RE..” is only available in directory B. “.DS_…” is only available in directory A. Everything else is available in both…

How to quickly compare two directories